Tag: music

  • Long tones & a new label

    I have finished a new album. This one follows a completely separate path from Kumea Sound — no handpan will be heard on it. The album grew out of a simple desire: to hear a very long sustained note played on a very low flute.

    The result became an exploration of maximalist minimalism — all compositions revolve around sustained A notes, pulses, and movement in the stereo field, occasionally branching into harmony. I wanted to explore the relationship between a sustained tone, textures, and perceived spatiality.

    I will release the album under a new alias, Atonauer. Yet this name feels like more than just an alias. In 2023, Atonauer appeared to me in a dream. I was possibly in New York, attending his massive retrospective exhibition. The show featured hundreds of large blue paintings, each paired with a musical composition. Together, the sounds and paintings formed a bureau-like maze — an installation that felt more like a spatial catalog or archive of his work than a conventional aesthetic retrospective.

    After seeing the show, as we walked across a plaza in front of the museum, I saw his easily recognizable bearded figure exit through the main doors. He was wearing his famous light-colored, wide-brimmed fedora. The people on the plaza recognized him and greeted him with massive applause. In that moment, it struck me how remarkable an artist he truly was.

    After waking up, I had a lingering sense that Atonauer was real. I remembered his paintings and how their musical components had sounded. It felt unreal that I could imagine all of that. There was a strong element of Yves Klein (the blue color and the use of drone sound), but as a character, Atonauer reminded me more of Brancusi, with his beard and simple clothing.

    I wasn’t ready to return to painting — as a student, I had experimented with it for a time but soon focused my studies on sound and installation art — yet I couldn’t let go of the dream of seeing or hearing some part of Atonauer’s work in our version of reality. So, I started with sound. Within a few months, I had sketched out a 43-minute ambient album that revolves around the note A.

    I suppose I could have released the album back in 2024, but I got busy moving to a new house, marrying my wife, and having a child. In the summer of 2025, I did the final tweaks to the tracks and sent the album to Taylor Deupree for mastering. He did a wonderful job giving the tracks their final sheen — which, in this case, felt more like a soft powder coating than polishing. The drones and sounds on the album have weight and texture; they dance and swirl around the listener, giving a sense of being surrounded by something enormous, deep, and ever-transforming.

    “Ocean in A” will be out in a couple of weeks. I’ll announce the release date once I receive the vinyl delivery schedule from the manufacturer. The album will come out on my new label, Future Sonant — a sister label to Future Rust, which I founded in 2019. While Future Rust continues to focus on forward-looking handpan music, Future Sonant will serve as a home for more experimental and exploratory works.

    The logo of my new label, Future Sonant.

  • Concert at Hvalfjörður

    On the 29th of June 2025, I played an acoustic concert at Hallgrímskirkjan í Saurbæ, a small church at a beautiful fjord in Iceland. I was asked to write a text for the handout. Here’s what I wrote.

    When I was 17, I came to Hvalfjörður with the intention to stay there for one week. The atmosphere opened a door, liberating a flow of music and poetry inside me, and blurring my sense of time: one week became two, then three. At the end of those weeks, I didn’t want to leave.

    On our drive back to Reykjavík, I tried pointing my Olympus film camera towards the mountains, to capture a memory of the landscape and bring it back to Finland with me, but no matter how I tried, the narrow-angle optics could frame only a rock or two within the viewfinder.

    This landscape had healed something in me, and as much as I loved it, I couldn’t bring it back with me. I couldn’t capture the experience of being here among these mountains and fjords with my camera, not the way I felt it.

    This turned out to be one of my deepest and most enduring realisations in life. My only option was to simply let the landscape transform something deep within me, affect me with its beauty.

    Like most music, mine is also made of melody and rhythm, but what I’m thinking the most about when I compose is space. I think of the emptiness around the notes — not necessarily pauses or rhythmic gaps, but the spatiality embracing the music: the lived experience of being here with sound.

    Many of the songs I play today were composed during the pandemic. I called them a reflection of the collective sense of emptiness the world shared during those unreal times. Some of them became quite popular online during the last three years. But for me, they are songs that are meant to be played in a small room, like a living room, or a small church.

    The cupolas that I play are empty vessels built of metal. An empty church is made of stone. We are made of bone and flesh and whatever our soul is made of. We, too, are empty, and we often try to fill our emptiness with whatever we can. Similarly, the songs are empty until we fill them with our own presence.

    Thank you for being here today with these songs.

  • Altered Spaces, Altered States

    When I write that a sound is more delicate than a theoretical concept, I mean that it contains information about the surroundings in which it exists, and it can’t really be considered without all that information. The sound of a handclap activates the space around it, making its resonant and reverberant potential reveal itself — it doesn’t really exist without the space around it.

    There are ways to manipulate or suppress the acoustic properties of a room by using complex materials or architectural designs. A fully treated, non-echoic chamber will feel extremely strange for most people because non-echoic spaces hardly ever occur in the natural world. A highly reverberating and echoing space, on the other hand, can strike us with awe and inspire us with complex, even religious experiences. Next to a large echoing structure we can feel the presence of something larger than us.

    Echo and reverb both locate the listener in time and space. By changing the acoustic properties of a space, we can introduce various effects to the mind. The development of experimental sound design methods during the last century has allowed artists to express themselves not only through their instruments but also through virtual spatial effects, such as reverb and delay.

    As a musician, I know that reverbs and delays can introduce an exciting dimension to any sound. They add texture, create rhythmic effects, and most importantly — a sense of instruments and sounds being somewhere, in relation to us.

    The composer Edgar Varèse wrote in 1936, “When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived.”

    Varèse dreamt of artistic expression, but I believe he wanted to express a certain aspect of being in the spatiotemporal world. We now have the tools to create and recreate imaginary echoes and reverbs at will.